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If I Don't Laugh, I'll Cry

How Death, Debt, and Comedy Led to a Life of Faith, Farming, and Forgetting What I Came into This Room For

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Read by the author.

Some people have life all figured out. This book is for the rest of us.

Molly Stillman has lived the type of life that when shared, people stop in their tracks and ask "Wait, what happened?" Molly's mother, Lynda Van Devanter Buckley, served as an Army nurse during the Vietnam War and wrote the bestselling memoir Home Before Morning. When Molly was seventeen, Lynda passed away after an eight-year battle with an autoimmune disorder due to her exposure to Agent Orange. Four years later Molly turned twenty-one and unexpectedly inherited a quarter of a million dollars from her mother's estranged family's estate. Through "retail therapy" and a long series of grossly irresponsible financial decisions, Molly found herself broke with over $36,000 in credit card debt less than two years later. Shame, guilt, and embarrassment set in.

With aspirations of a career in comedy, Molly used humor to mask the pain and brokenness she felt, believing that if she looked joyful and put together on the outside, it would eventually be true on the inside. Instead, she spent the next few years depressed, lonely, and feeling alienated from those closest to her. But an unlikely call with a compassionate credit counselor, meeting the spreadsheet-loving man who eventually became her husband, and a surprising visit to a church started her on a path that changed everything.

If I Don't Laugh, I'll Cry offers humor and hope to all of us who have struggled to reconcile the life we are living with the life we thought we wanted to have. Molly will bring you into the tension of feeling both joy and grief and show you that every broken, messed up story has a purpose, and it's possible to gain everything if you're willing to surrender it all to Jesus.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 29, 2024
      In this high-spirited debut memoir, Still Being Molly blogger Stillman traces her rocky path from grief to faith and the trials she faced on the way. As a child, Stillman loved to make people laugh and dreamed of Saturday Night Live fame. Life began to unravel after her mother’s 2002 death from a possible autoimmune disease, however, and when the 21-year-old author received a quarter-million-dollar inheritance from an estranged grandmother in 2006, she quickly began burning through it (“When I missed my mom, I spent money. When my boyfriend and I argued, I spent money”). She moved to New York City after college graduation to pursue a comedy career, and here describes dizzying days spent at comedy shows, “meeting random guys at bars,” and generally “chasing after worldly idols like fame, fortune, men, and status” before facing up to her credit card debt of more than $36,000, a “rock bottom” moment that led her to a deep faith. While the two sometimes mesh awkwardly, Stillman’s spiritual insights are affecting and her candid humor entertains, as when she recalls “being talked off the edge by a customer service representative” helping her survey her debt (“I can only assume our call was being recorded for quality assurance purpose. Whoever reviewed was in for a real doozy”). Readers will be won over by Stillman’s no-holds-barred account of finding God and herself.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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